Category Archives: Politics & Government

“Like watching Gidget address the Reichstag”

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[Alert: McCainiacs and Palinistas can skip this post. You won’t appreciate Matt Taibbi’s biting wit or pithy rage. Go watch a Sean Hannity re-run. And I’ve had some email reminding me I had said I wasn’t going to write about politics anymore. I believe what I said was, I would no longer ‘discuss’ politics.]

My favorite political writer, Matt Taibbi has outdone himself with his column  on Sarah Palin. When interstellar archeologists dig through the rubble of what was once the U.S.A. and wonder what the fuck happened, I hope they stumble across Mr. Taibbi’s column. Every line is a gem but I’ll share just a few of my favorites:

“Four-chinned delegates from places like Arkansas and Georgia are pouring joyously out the gates (of the GOP convention) in search of bars where they can load up on Zombies and Scorpion Bowls and other “wild” drinks and extramaritally grope their turkey-necked female companions in bathroom stalls as part of the “unbelievable time” they will inevitably report to their pals back home.

Only 21st-century Americans can pass through a metal detector six times in an hour and still think they’re at a party.

Here’s the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.

But Americans like politicians who hate books and see the face of Jesus in every tree stump. They like them stupid and mean and ignorant of the rules.”

And we love Sarah.

Moosehunting with Aden Nak

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Aden Nak doesn’t understand why it’s taboo to say someone is too dumb to be president. He somehow managed to get his hands on the flow chart used to prep Governor Palin for last night’s debate.

“The truth is that Palin didn’t answer any questions she didn’t want to tonight, and she said she’d do exactly that at the start of the debate. She had a hand full of index cards and a brain full of buzz words, and it was her job to say them all in front of the camera. Actually, it was her job to say them while looking at Joe Biden for five seconds, then looking at the camera for five seconds, and then looking back at Biden to start over again. It was like she was on a timer. One of the many things she’d probably been coached on after the whole flap about McCain not looking Obama in the eyes.”

RealScoop Tells You When Politicians, Celebrities Are Lying

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“Dubbed the Believability Meter, RealScoop’s analysis technology analyzes over 100 vocal elements of the human voice and performs over 1,000 calculations per second to find out if a politician or celebrity is telling the truth. On Tuesday, RealScoop will cover the Vice Presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, putting each one’s statements to its Believability test.” [Link]

In Praise of Political Tweets – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com

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NYTimes’ Saul Hansell thinks Twitter might well be the birth of a media form that combines talk radio, Digg and late-night comedians.

“Like talk radio, you get an unvarnished and largely real-time window into what a wide swath of people are actually talking about. Like Digg, you see people point to the articles and videos that they want to share. And like late-night TV (or a politician’s sound bite for the evening news), there is a premium on pithy one-liners that try to get to the heart of the matter.”

Where in the world is W?

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Fbibadgepsd3441
In a few months George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will return to private life. They’ll be surrounded by Secret Service guys (does the VP get SS protection?) but they have to be somewhere.

I’d like to "crowd source" a volunteer army of citizen journalists to report the last known location of these guys. No trespassing or peaking through windows, just a short report:

"W entourage just left Crawford ranch, heading for airport."
"W group just checked into Paris Hilton."

Include phone pic if you have one. All of which goes to a map.

You can be damned sure the NSA knows where you are (if they want to), so why shouldn’t we know where these guys are? I know, the FBI will explain that to me in some detail.

election.twitter.com

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People of a certain age might remember old TV shows that used an “applause meter” (it was just an audio level meter) to allow the studio audience to “vote” on something or someone. The kids at Twitter have come up with a 21st century twist for tomorrow night’s debate. From NYT’s The Caucus:

“If Senators John McCain and Barack Obama actually do debate Friday night, you will be able to watch what thousands of viewers think of their verbal sparring almost as they talk. Twitter, the service that lets techno-hipsters broadcast their thoughts in 140-character bursts, is setting up a special politics page to make it easy to tune into the chatter.

At midnight Thursday, the company is launching election.twitter.com, the first specialized section of its site. Like Twitter’s main service, it is dominated by a big white box. But instead of typing an answer to “What are you doing?” the election site asks, “What do you think?”

Below that box is a constantly scrolling display of the thoughts (called “tweets” in Twitterspeak) of other Twitter users. These include all the tweets entered on the election page as well as those entered in any other part of the service with obvious election-related phrases, such as “Palin.”

I think our company should do this very thing for each of the colleges we work with. Sure, you’d get a few fans tweeting that the coach made a bad call but I suspect the majority of posts would be supportive. And what a sense of “being part of the crowd” this would create for fans listening to the radio or watching TV. Might even be something a hip, web-savvy company would want to sponsor.

President Bartlet will see you now Senator

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I never got hooked on West Wing but I must have been the only one not watching this popular TV show about fictional U. S. President Jed Bartlet (played by Martin Sheen). NYT columnist Maureen Dowd asked WW creator Aaron Sorkin to imagine a meeting between President Bartlet and Senator Barack Obama. As you know, I’m fond of such fictional conversations, so I share a nugget or two from this one:

OBAMA The problem is we can’t appear angry. Bush called us the angry left. Did you see anyone in Denver who was angry?

BARTLET Well … let me think. …We went to war against the wrong country, Osama bin Laden just celebrated his seventh anniversary of not being caught either dead or alive, my family’s less safe than it was eight years ago, we’ve lost trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, thousands of lives and we lost an entire city due to bad weather. So, you know … I’m a little angry.

OBAMA What would you do?

BARTLET GET ANGRIER! … Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

“Fooled, and used, and a lot of people died.”

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Bush and Paulson say the proposed bailout plan is the only way to save our economy. The only way. Okay, Dave Winer is willing to support the plan on the following conditions:

“Bush and Cheney must resign immediately. No immunity, no pardons. Nancy Pelosi will become President, promising not to run for re-election on November 4. Her term will be one of the shortest in US history, just long enough to enact the provisions of the bill being proposed by the Republican administration. If it really is the best thing for the country and not a trick, then the Republicans, being impressed by the seriousness of it, would have to insist that Bush step aside and let the Democrats execute the plan. The entire Bush cabinet stays in office through January 20, but reports, of course to Pelosi. And that includes Paulson. It’s pretty simple. If they won’t do it, we know they’re bluffing.”